It is said that Socrates, while walking through a market in Athens, would stop in front of the stalls and say, more or less: “How many things there are that I do not need!” (1)
Two thousand five hundred years later, we still walk past shop windows, with the word “luxury” written everywhere. And yet, ask ten people to define it, and you will get ten different answers. This is not merely an impression. Researchers who have studied the subject for decades have reached the same conclusion: there is no academic consensus on what truly defines luxury, and every country, every era, seems to have its own criteria for judging it. (2)(3)
So, what is luxury, after all?
A word born from excess
The word comes from luxus, a Latin term referring to excess, extravagance, but also splendour (4). It is from the same root that we get the word “lust” one of the seven deadly sins.
Originally, the two words were therefore not so far apart: they expressed the same idea of going beyond, of something exceeding the normal measure. Over time, however, their paths diverged. “Lust” retained the darker meaning of the Latin word: excess seen as a moral failing. “Luxury,” on the other hand, took a more favourable direction, gradually coming to suggest elegance, refinement, and quality.
This detail is more than just a linguistic curiosity. It shows that, from the very beginning, the word carried two faces within it: the one we admire, and the one we distrust. Luxury has never been a neutral word. Even today, we rarely use it without some form of judgement attached to it. We say “that’s a luxury” with as much desire as reservation. This ambivalence, inherited directly from Latin, may explain why the word remains so difficult to define, and why, centuries later, it continues to provoke debate.
Is luxury simply what is expensive?
This is probably the first idea that comes to mind. And it is not an unreasonable one. At the end of the nineteenth century, the American economist Thorstein Veblen observed that some people buy an object precisely because it is expensive (5). What matters is not the object itself, but the fact that others can see that you can afford it. He called this conspicuous consumption (6). In this case, the price does not measure the value of the object: it is a message sent to others.
But price tells us very little about what is actually inside an object. It may be high because of the material, fashion, the name attached to it, or the hours of work required to make it. Two objects sold at the same price may have almost nothing in common. Conversely, you can hold an inexpensive object in your hands that someone has made with extraordinary care.
There is also a trap here. If luxury is reduced to price, then all it takes to make something luxurious is to raise its price, and we no longer ask what lies behind it.
Price is an indicator, never a definition.
Is luxury what serves no purpose?
This is the path taken by the philosopher André Comte-Sponville: luxury, he argues in essence, is the enjoyment of the unnecessary. (7)
Take a silver spoon. It does not serve its purpose any better than an ordinary spoon, but it brings an additional pleasure. Voltaire expressed a similar idea in the eighteenth century, when he defended the superfluous as something “very necessary”(8). Georges Bataille, for his part, approaches luxury from a different angle: in The Accursed Share, he sees it as a form of expenditure, that is, the use of a surplus beyond strict necessity. (9)
The idea is compelling, but it leaves an open question. A handmade chair serves the same purpose as any other chair: you sit on it. And yet, when you touch it, you can feel that it is different. What it has in addition is not another function. It is something that has been put into it: someone’s time, attention, and choices.
If luxury is what goes beyond necessity, then perhaps what goes beyond is not the object itself, but what it contains.
A silver spoon is not luxurious because it is useless, but because someone decided that an everyday object deserved something more than mere functionality.
Is luxury what is rare?
This is perhaps the strongest answer of all, but it has one particular characteristic: it changes with time. Take purple, the deep red-purple colour worn by the Romans. To produce even a small amount of it, thousands of shells had to be collected (12). It was so precious that, during the war against Carthage, a law restricted the purple garments women were allowed to wear (10)(11). Once the war was won, Roman women succeeded in having the law repealed. Today, no one considers the colour purple a luxury.
There are countless other examples. Pepper and sugar, which now fill our kitchen cupboards, were once highly valuable commodities because they came from far away and were difficult to obtain. (10) What is rare in one era becomes commonplace in another as soon as production or transportation methods change.
So the real question is: what is rare today?
Almost everything can now be produced quickly, in large quantities and identically. What is becoming rare are the things that cannot be accelerated: the time required to master a skill, the hours devoted to a single piece, the attention given to every step of the process.
And there are two ways for something to be rare. Rarity can be deliberately created by limiting production. Or it can arise naturally from the very nature of the work, because making something by hand takes time and no two pieces are ever exactly alike.
What these three questions have in common
Price, the unnecessary, rarity: none of these answers is sufficient on its own. But they all point in the same direction. Across the centuries, what the word “luxury” has almost always referred to is something that cannot be obtained easily: time, knowledge, and attention.
Price tells us what others can see. The unnecessary tells us what goes beyond need. Rarity tells us what cannot be found everywhere. But behind these three ideas lies the same reality: someone took the time to make something, and that time cannot be found somewhere else.
This is what craftsmanship keeps alive. A handmade object carries the hours devoted to it, a skill that takes years to learn, and often something that can never be reproduced exactly. This does not mean that it is perfect, nor that everything handmade qualifies as luxury.
It means that it contains what the word has always been trying to name. So perhaps the most accurate definition is also the simplest: Luxury is what someone has given their time to. And the next time we hold an object in our hands, perhaps we can ask the question that really matters: How much time, and how much attention, is in this?
- Diogenes Laërtius, via Wikiquote
- Kapferer, J.-N., & Michaut, A. (2016). Cité dans : Pursuing the concept of luxury: A cross-country comparison and segmentation of luxury buyers’ perception of luxury.
- von Wallpach, S., Hemetsberger (2023). Who creates luxury? Unveiling the essence of luxury creation through three perspectives: A scoping review. Qualitative Market Research.
- La Jaune et la Rouge (2025). Étymologie : à propos du luxe et de ses paradoxes.
- Veblen, Thorstein (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.
- Institut numérique (2013). III. Le luxe comme production d’images et de représentations.
- Dictionnaire de textes philosophiques. Luxe.
- Wikipedia. Le Mondain.
- Liucci-Goutnikov, N. (2011, June). Le luxe, la part maudite et la plus-value. Institut Français de la Mode
- Wikipédia (2025). Lex Oppia
- Nunc est bibendum (2025). Lois somptuaires : Dura lex, sed… flexibilis.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tyrian Purple. Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color.
